Many of the readers were prompted by last year's story about how Yahoo's attempts to inhibit spam often cause more problems than they solve. "Hey, I have the same bloody issue with Yahoo's grey listing," wrote one reader recently. "Here's a dumber point though -- Roger Communications, the media giant, is tied into Yahoo so all their e-mail goes through Yahoo. Imagine how much mail they are losing. Case in point, while your communications logs show the messages eventually getting transferred to the Yahoo servers, many messages still do not make it to their intended recipient. Another one of their stupid practices is they cap the allowed recipients of any given message at five. Ask yourself how many distribution groups do you have the have more than five recipients? Like, give me a break. I think all their techs with any experience have moved on -- I've been fighting with the morons who are left for weeks!"

Yahoo's vast experience at dealing with the spammers who use its free e-mail doesn't seem to have given it a leg up in detecting junk messages. "Yahoo has worst spam filters of all," wrote another reader. "Of the three biggie free e-mail vendors, I find that Gmail has superlative spam filtering, Hotmail is pretty good, and Yahoo is abysmal. Of the three, my Yahoo e-mail address has never been made public, yet it gets the most spam, much of which is not redirected into the bulk mail folder. Because of this, I have continued to avoid Yahoo for email. I have also used a number of hosting resellers for various domains, and Yahoo is the most problematic when it comes to sending legitimate e-mail and having it filed into the recipient's bulk folder. Interestingly, I have SBC (now AT&T) /Yahoo DSL and the sbcglobal.net mailboxes -- hosted on Yahoo -- do a much better filtering job."

But even paying customers for Yahoo's e-mail services can find themselves having trouble. "I'm at the end of my rope with Yahoo mail," wrote another reader. "We have about 30 paid e-mail dial-up accounts with them in various locales here in the Southwest," wrote another reader. "In the last month or so a problem has arisen with delayed e-mail messages. Any time we send a message using POP access the message is delayed for hours. In one case I had a message that wasn't delivered for nearly 24 hours after it was sent. The average delay seems to be about 6-8 hours. I have chatted with Yahoo techs, called their support line, and e-mailed them -- all to no avail. I was promised last week that the problem would be fixed in 24 hours. That was six days ago. The email is still delayed and it is becoming a business problem for my company."

That reader wrote me back a few days later to say he had finally gotten through to the Yahoo e-mail support group. "They said there were aware of the problem and it had been on-going for two -- it's been closer to four. The engineers have not given them a timeframe on a fix. We will be forced to move to a different service soon if we can't get it resolved. Yahoo mail used to be a good service but they have been having problems like this frequently during the past six months."

If you know a company that's too busy re-designing the Internet to bother fixing their existing products, send them a message by posting your comments about it below or by writing Ed Foster at Foster@gripe2ed.com.